Review: In ‘Kings,’ Washington Is Where Idealism Goes to Die

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A debate between Zach Grenier, as an entrenched Texas senator, and Eisa Davis, as his upstart opponent, is a highlight of Sarah Burgess’s play “Kings” at the Public Theater.CreditCreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

For all the post-2016 idealists rushing to run for office on a platform of changing the system, I have two words of caution: Sydney Millsap.

Sydney is a political neophyte, hoping to break the stranglehold of entrenched interests that’s choking democracy and enabling the kleptocrats. But unlike you, she’s fictional, and fabulous: a stunning black tax nerd and Gold-Star widow from Texas who’s as familiar with the carried interest loophole as with the history of the sizzling fajita at Chili's.

In short, she’s a blue-state fantasy of a red-state politician.

Whether or not she is the actual protagonist of Sarah Burgess’s “Kings,” which opened on Tuesday night at the Public Theater, is the defining problem for both the play and for us. Certainly she has come to Washington — after a special election to fill a vacant House seat in her Dallas district — with the intention of undoing unfairness and staying honest. When a lobbyist says, “She tells her voters the truth even if it makes her look bad,” it is not understood as a compliment.

Still, in Eisa Davis’s terrific performance, a character who might seem a humorless, civics-spouting Ms. Deeds instead comes across as one of those politicians, like Elizabeth Warren, who makes superiority feel almost glamorous.

But as Sydney quickly discovers, there are powers even stronger than her moral certainty. These include John McDowell, an entrenched Texas senator and political frenemy. More sinister, and less public, are the lobbyists and semipermanent political staffers who connect candidates to donors for their mutual benefit, if no one else’s.

The two specimens of this type that Ms. Burgess offers in “Kings” are not designed to elicit your sympathy. Kate (Gillian Jacobs, late of NBC’s “Community”) not only repackages her clients’ grubby schemes as votable policy, but is also rude and double-dealing. Lauren (Aya Cash, a star of “You’re the Worst” on FXX) is more polished but finds Sydney’s ethical intransigence just as mystifying. If the congresswoman would just go along with that carried interest loophole for private equity fund managers, she could reap millions in donations from that sector alone. So what if it’s hypocritical?

Alas, Sydney is no hypocrite. She is willing to humiliate herself, as the party requires, by dunning donors while on enforced fund-raising retreats in Vail, but she won’t let anyone buy her. “I will take their money,” she tells voters. “I will not do as they say.”

This paints Sydney, and “Kings,” into a self-righteous corner. When McDowell (a wily Zach Grenier) threatens to close off the spigots of cash that Sydney needs for re-election, she makes the only choice she (or the play) has left: to mount an even unlikelier campaign than the one that got her to Washington in the first place.

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Ms. Davis, center, flanked by Gillian Jacobs and Aya Cash as political operatives in “Kings.”CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

Whenever it focuses on Sydney’s dash through the minefields of democracy, “Kings” is entertaining and informative, if not surprising theatrically. Its high point, two-thirds of the way through, is a town-hall-style debate in which she declaims, in perfectly formed phrases, the kinds of things many of us have been rehearsing for months in front of our televisions and on Twitter feeds. The greed of special interests, the mendacity of politicians, the cockroach endurance of lobbyists: If these are familiar, they are also endlessly compelling.

But with no items on the agenda beyond transparency, the bridge between politics and policy is down. Nothing Ms. Burgess gives Sydney to say connects meaningfully to the daily lives of people outside the Beltway.

“Kings,” you eventually realize, is not really about Sydney, anyway; her story — the only one you care about — basically dribbles away after the debate. Her entire existence within the play seems designed as a placard to announce one thing: When politics neutralizes the ethically excellent it leaves the field open to everyone else.

Surely, then, the title refers to the lobbyists, the only characters as powerful at the end as they were at the beginning. Kate in particular may be Ms. Burgess’s intended heroine. She does nothing so dramaturgically crude as have a change of heart, but over time her understanding of the world is complicated by Sydney’s. Perhaps she’ll have a change of heart later.

Unfortunately, Kate, too, is a placard, so thinly drawn and acted that we cannot be bothered with her personal journey. In that sense, “Kings” — like Ms. Burgess’s previous play, “Dry Powder,” seen at the Public in 2016 — is a plot in search of an emotion. Kate and Lauren, no less than Sydney and the senator, are improbable exaggerations, caricatures with no human shading. This makes for powerful oppositions and playable scenes but little investment.

That fault mattered less in “Dry Powder,” about a trio of private equity vultures. We aren’t really meant to care who prevails and who is outwitted in their leveraged buyout schemes; the play’s purpose is simply to expose the system.

That’s true of “Kings,” too, but there is something much larger at stake in a story about public governance than in one about private greed. It’s a telltale problem that the word “Democrat” goes assiduously unmentioned, though all the characters clearly skew blue. Venality in Washington may be bipartisan, but not strictly so; to obfuscate that feels political in the wrong way.

Of course, it’s Ms. Burgess’s prerogative to write a play demonstrating the thesis that ethical politics is impossible in our broken system. And to the extent that “Kings” serves as a brake on expectations for the upcoming midterm elections, it may be a timely corrective for its intended audience.

But it is too divorced from the real world consequences of its characters’ machinations to support any larger ambition, and in Thomas Kail’s sleek staging — he directed “Dry Powder,” too, and before that “Hamilton” — the gravity of the subject and the sitcom zing of the style make an uncomfortable combo.

Which renders “Kings,” though a more important work than “Dry Powder,” also less satisfying. When only political careers are at stake, politics suffers, and plays do too.